Poker taught me to appreciate math.
I don't mean the calculative aspects of math, strictly speaking, I mean the broader theoretical underpinnings of mathematics and their implications, not just for poker, but for the art of paying attention in general.
To me, poker is a beautiful metaphor for the way life really works. That is to say that because it is a game in which luck is intrinsically involved, it is a reasonable magnitude more real than a pure strategy game like chess.
In chess there is a right move and a wrong move and the value of those moves is clearly defined. Assuming you've correctly reasoned out a problem, you can determine, with great accuracy, what the correct move to do in a given situation is and what its exact consequences are.
In poker no such certainty exists. You can play a hand absolutely perfectly, make all the right moves, and still lose when your opponent hits a miracle card. Once you decide to play a hand, you have no control over the cards no matter what you do. With this critical component out of each player's individual control, the game fundamentally changes from what could otherwise be, theoretically, a pure game of skill.
Now, I'm not saying that Poker is a game of luck. Far from it. Poker is merely a game of uncertain outcomes. However, just because an outcome is uncertain, does not mean it is unlikely. In Holdem, pocket aces will beat a random hand an average of about 85% of the time. Aces should win then a significant amount of the time, and you would expect that you would rarely see them lose.
Sometimes you would be right. But sometimes you would be wrong. Occasionally, you will see (or unfortunately
experience) Aces lose three or four times in a row against hands that are significant underdogs. This doesn't jibe with our intuitive sense of the math because we are analyzing the situation incorrectly.
The 85% of the time that Aces win is an accurate number - but its one that is an average resulting from hundreds of thousands if not millions of hands. If you flip a coin one hundred times, you will occasionally notice a particular pattern emerge. Once in awhile, heads will come up ten times in a row, and perhaps 75 times in 100 overall when you'd expect it to be 50. The truth is it
is 50, but that 50 is averaged over a much larger sample size. Accordingly, short apparent runs or patterns
will happen. In fact, it'd be weird if they didn't.
Since flipping a coin a hundred thousand times (or playing AA against a random hand a hundred thousand times) will net a particular average, it stands to reason that many possible combinations of events will contribute to the average. This includes apparent patterns. I say apparent because these "patterns" become relatively insignificant when taking the wider view of one hundred thousand or a million trials.
In other words, the idea that there is a pattern, or a meaning behind a particular random event is simply nearsighted thinking. An individual event is merely one aspect of a larger statistical event playing itself out - a probability wave for you physics folks.
And therein the metaphor lies.
As hard as we try, we can never control all variables in any particular situation. Even when we control a high percentage of potential outcomes by focusing and being particularly thorough, there are still factors which can cause us to fail. Life is not a vacuum.
Much as a particular poker hand is but once incident in a larger statistical probability wave, an individual is merely a potential outcome in the grander probability wave. And, more concretely, an individual's efforts can only harness a maximum amount of control over any particular outcome.
This lack of control has certain profound consequences, but they are more theoretical than practical. However, the benefits of adopting this theoretical perspective are significant, both at the poker table and in life.
At the poker table, the fact that Aces will lose 15% of the time rarely influences your decisionmaking. There's no such thing as a sure thing, after all, but I'll take a 4:1 edge every time thank you. At the end, I'll expect to come out ahead, and that is simply the best that I can hope for.
Poker is gambling, then, in that the outcome is uncertain. However poker is intelligent gambling because reason and discipline allow you to put yourself in consistently favorable situations and thus give you a long term edge over your competition. This is the meaning of the common poker term "EV" or "expected value." Thus, poker players frequently say that a particular play is +EV or -EV to describe whether it is profitable in the long term. Playing pocket aces against one opponent all in before the flop in holdem is a +EV play, because you will win about 85% of the time, so if you play them for $10 a hand for 10 hands, you should expect to win $85 on average. If however you are the poor guy playing a random hand against aces all in before the flop under the same conditions, you expect to only win $15 per $100 but to lose $85. Thus for every $100 invested your EV is -$85, clearly a bad investment.
This is an extreme example, but it is used for merely illustrative purposes. The same principle applies in just about every decision at the poker table. Similarly, it should apply in just about every decision in real life. EV does not necessarily need to refer to money, it can refer to whatever you expect to gain from a particular decision and/or outcome. Thus, I can expect on average, that everytime I give my freeancee, Janessa, a dozen roses, I will gain a certain amount of units of happiness in my relationship. Clearly giving her roses, then is +EV as far as my relationship goes.
Of course, doing it often may diminish that EV, where playing aces frequently will not affect their value. The difference is accounted for by the fact that the frequency of giving her roses is a measurable percentage of the EV. That is to say that if I give her roses once a month, the EV will be fairly high as she will be pleasantly surprised by them and not take them for granted. Part of her pleasure, and through that my eventual EV, will be taken from that surprise. The same is not true with pocket aces before the flop in holdem because the EV comes entirely from profit in a given situation.
One could argue, of course, that there are still important similarities if we look closer. For example, the EV of playing aces
is affected by how we play them. If we always raise with them the same amount, we will become predictable, and our opponents will be able to get away from their hands easier. Similarly, if we always play them fast, we can expect our thinking opponents not to pay us off with a bigger pot because they will be expecting us to have Aces.
Perhaps this is approximately the same type of value as involved in the frequency of giving roses. If not, its close enough.
Ok, now the reason why this actually matters.
Life, like poker, is a series of interconnected statistical events which are at least partially random. In poker, this perspective helps you see the forest for the trees. You may feel insanely unlucky at times, but knowing that you are making +EV decisions over the long term should be comforting. Of course it never can take the sting entirely away from bad runs, but it can make them easier. Once you've played thousands upon thousands of hands and seen all that can happen for your own eyes and with your own money, your perspective becomes wider.
It is that wide perspective, in my estimation, that is what people mean when they describe Zen. One is at peace because one understands that one cannot control everything. This is not a passive surrender to the universe, however, but a realistic assessment of one's limitations. A person should always strive hard for their goals, but they are kept humble by the underlying random nature of events and are ready for the runs and patterns, both good and bad, that come along with living in this type of universe.
Interestingly, this perspective has at least one additional significant benefit: it provides you with better lenses for how
individual events occur. Broken down, what one person calls an individual event, such as pocket kings cracking pocket aces when both hands are all in before the flop in holdem, is really a series of events and decisions. One person decided not to fold pocket kings, despite whatever evidence he may or may not have had available that he may have been beat. Whether this decision is right or wrong is immaterial here. The point is that he could not have cracked pocket aces had he not played pocket kings. Nor could he have cracked them if he had not been at the table at that particular time for that particular deal. Had he had to go to the bathroom, his hand would have been dead, the Aces would, presumably, not have been cracked, and the entire tournament would have been different.
The first point, whether to play the kings, is within our control, and the second, whether we were there at a particular time, is. We should thus not worry about the second factor, and accept that over the long run, we would be a 4:1 dog if we somehow knew with certainty our opponent had aces. The key then is to cull together the data and make a determination of the hand we are up against based on innumerable potential factors that change the situation. The position of the initial raiser, for example. People tend to play much looser in late position than in early position because they have to beat less opponents. Thus, someone opening from first position is much more likely to have aces than someone opening from a common steal position, such as last position (the button) or the position before last (the cutoff).
This does not mean they
have exactly AA
, only that their potential range of hands is narrower, and that this range is merely a factor in the overall analysis. In a tournament, you might strongly consider stack size. A person with a short stack relative to the blinds, say only enough for two or three big blinds may be desperate, and thus more willing to gamble with a marginal hand than he normally would be. This too must be considered and weighed in the analysis.
Statistical perspective on the randomness of larger events thus assists us in our analysis of what we think of as individual or at least smaller events. Moreover, because of the large number of potential factors in any one decision, the smartest poker players
pay attention and try to remember what a particular player did in past situations to determine what they are likely tro do in the future.
And that is zen. Zen is paying attention. If you pay attention you can give yourself the largest possible edge in life because your consideration of the variables of any particular decision will necessarily be based on more accurate, though always imperfect, information. And that is why poker is a metaphor for zen, why zen is a metaphor for life, and why paying attention is the key to
both.--Rob
